#1 Night Pleasures – Sherrilyn Kenyon

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He is solitude. He is darkness. He is the ruler of the night. Yet Kyrian of Thrace has just woken up handcuffed to his worst nightmare: An accountant. Worse, she's being hunted by one of the most lethal vampires out there. And if Amanda Devereaux goes down, then he does too. But it's not just their lives that are hanging in the balance. Kyrian and Amanda are all that stands between humanity and oblivion. Let's…

So when I first read this I thought it would be a continuation of Julian and Grace's story, however I was pleasantly surprised to find that instead this book was focused on Kyrian (of Thrace) and Amanda. At the time of starting this book I had NO IDEA who or what Kyrian was, however I was pretty sure Amanda was related to Grace's best friend Selena. The only thing that suggested Kyrian wasn't pure human initially was the prologue, which talked about Kyrian of Thrace's reputation and how he is now weirdly enough immortal.

We start the book with Amanda and Selena chatting about her ex and bagging him out while Selena does a tarot card reading for Selena. Later that night Amanda does yet another favour for her twin, Tabitha, and while doing so is mistakenly kidnapped! Good news is when she wakes up she's not alone. Weirdly though, when this guy wakes up it turns out he's so allergic to the sun he starts burning straight away. Like smoke and everything. To get them out Kyrian calls a friend who's a coroner and gets them out, and to the city morgue, much to Amanda's embarrassment (I think for this one you really need to read how Sherrilyn tells this story, it cracks me up every time!).

One this leads to another, which leads to Amanda and Kyrian being attacked by evil vampires and Kyrian desperately trying to protect both Amanda who doesn't believe in the occult even though she's surrounded by it, and Tabitha who believes that all vampires (or I should say, fanged people) are evil who both make his life difficult.

At the end of Kyrian and Amanda's first day together Kyrian gets the surprise of his life when Amanda takes him to Julian to get their handcuffs removed. Julian and Kyrian have a moment of "holy crap, am I really seeing what I'm seeing?" since they fought together back in ancient Greece. Before Julian was locked in a book as a sex slave, and before Kyrian was executed.

Over the course of the book we learn the Amanda is one of many in her family who has supernatural powers and she begins to learn to harness them. While Kyrian gave up his soul when he died to Artemis to had 24 hours to exact revenge on those that were responsible for his death to in turn kill Daimons (evil vampires) to release the human souls they are eating. Yea...so the vampires in this series eat human souls rather than blood and the only way they can take possession of the souls is to kill the human. And the souls start dying as soon as the Daimons eat them, and the only way to release them is to kill them with a stab through the heart. Which is where the Dark Hunters (including Kyrian) comes into thing. To hunt and kill the Daimons freeing the human souls so they don't die. To help them achieve this they are made "allergic" to the sun to make the fight fair, with many of the same traits as the Daimons, including having fangs.

Those fangs are what cause Kyrian grief with Amanda's twin Tabitha. Cue a whole lot of in-fighting between Amanda and Tabitha over Kyrian and you have the drama for the book. Which I personally found quite entertaining. Sherrilyn's writing style is always guaranteed to make me laugh in these types of moments in her books. And although Kyrian didn't make it easy to like him to begin with his constant need to protect Amanda (including making her horrible ex look and feel like a right douche bag) making sure she feels special does end up winning you to his side.

And finding out how he was betrayed causing his death, by his whoring wife, really does make you feel for him. And he ends up being the hero we will wish we had. Yea he kinda sucked at protecting Amanda, she ended up saving his ass. But she ruined her hand and had to pretend to be under a spell to free him. Given that Kyrian is from ancient Greece I felt for him having his masculinity ripped to shreds, but at the same time I definitely liked that for once the girl saved the guy from something other than emotional trauma.

In summary, reading this book had my laughing a fair bit, surprised at the type of vampires Sherrilyn had created and loving the fact that history was woven in throughout the book in so many interesting ways. And not just factual history, but taking advantage of myths and legends to create an amazing world.